Santi Bose 2.0

MANILA, Philippines - I never met the multi-media artist Santiago “Santi” Bose. He unexpectedly passed away before I could get the chance to. But I do know him, in the second-hand way you know fathers of friends, or cultural icons: through snippets of stories and fond recollections.  

I know him through his daughter Lilledeshan, a writer, singer, musician, who inherited her father’s free-spirited outlook and penchant for creating — and also his mountain-man thighs. (“That’s a Bose thing.”) The first anecdote Lille tells me about her father is of how his ashes are kept in an urn among the hanging coffins in Sagada.

Later, I am told that he was a great joker. “His uncommon jokes, like his art pieces, usually start out using familiar tropes. But then he’d give it a particular twist,” says Ed Geronia, a writer, who knew Santi through his visits to the Bose household in Manila as Lille’s friend. “Ask anyone who knew him and they likely have their own favorite Santi-isms,” Ed adds. “Is it art, or is it fart?” is a favorite quote. He was also a great hater. “He was the best pintasero ever,” says Lille. “He was never afraid to criticize other artists, national issues or our politicians.”

I am also told of those facts that earn an artist big-deal status: how Santi helped found and headed the Baguio Arts Guild which put up the Baguio Art Festivals, how his art, a prolific mix of paintings, set designs, and installations, were social commentaries on the Philippine aesthetic and culture. His work “communicated a strong sense of folk consciousness and religiosity”; Santi’s art combined his indigenous roots and self-taught techniques with foreign influences.

I also know Santi from visiting his house in Baguio, which, to an art outsider is both intimidating and intriguing. Though its structure is not imposing (quite understated, actually), there is that spine-chilling feel the first time you see the house. Energy, probably. Not exactly the sort that hangs over most old houses in the mountainous province, but the kind that feeds off and dishes out creativity. (After all, many an artist — whether internationally-based, Makiling-educated or Baguio-bred — has gone in and out of that house, leaving imprints, not quite as perceptible as their art, but still as haunting.) The front door opens up to a mural Santi completed in the ‘80s, a self-portrait of sorts displaying the artist in a white shirt and dark shades (could’ve been Wayfarers) amidst a background of seemingly random graffiti and the odd found object. It was the first Bose I saw up close and the raw emotion and snide intimations blew me away — and unnerved me. Santi Bose’s art does that to you.

“After my dad’s death, I would always encounter artists — writers, painters, filmmakers, musicians — who would tell me that they loved my dad’s work and were greatly influenced by him, from Manila to Baguio to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Hong Kong,” relates Lille. Santi worked with apprentices during his career and had passed on techniques to contemporary artists such as Jordan Mangosan. His work has also been used as a reference by today’s young art elite.

Ateneo Art awardee and multi-exhibited artist Kawayan de Guia, who’s known Santi since he was a boy — Santi was great friends with Kawayan’s father, the filmmaker, Kidlat Tahimik — recalls how “the magic feeling” in Santi’s paintings greatly influenced his own art. Kawayan now actually has his studio in the lower level of Santi’s house in Baguio. “I have this joke. I often say, when people ask me how things are in his studio, that I get possessed. When I wake up, the painting I was working on is done.”

One day, he found one of Santi’s unfinished works, and remarked to Lille, “Tapusin ko kaya?” The offhand remark became an impetus for the show that brings together those artists, writers and filmmakers that had been heavily inspired by Santi Bose’s imaginings. 

“Remix: Santiago Bose” took off on a concept where painters and multi-media artists would use Santi Bose’s ideas and images as a take-off point for their own new works. Artists who were evidently influenced or inspired by him in their current practice such as Kawayan de Guia and Alwin Reamillo, artists who were mentored by Bose directly or otherwise, like Ged Alangui, Jordan Mangosan and John Frank Sabado, via their involvement with the Baguio Arts Guild, and painters Arnel Agawin, Mark Justiniani, Leonard Aguinaldo were asked to reinterpret Santi’s Anting-Anting collection. This was one of the late artist’s last projects, a series of 59 drawings of the anting-anting — Filipino amulets or talismans — that he mounted on handmade paper and bound in a book. Santi used these amulets liberally in his work, citing how “they are a material reflection of the Filipino people’s collective psyche that have been used for centuries to protect them from cultural domination.”

The visual artists took Santi’s anting-anting drawings and created new works that showcased their own artistic statement. The eight were also asked to collaborate on Santi’s version of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” a massive canvas — 12x12 feet in size — which the artist was working on when he died in 2002.

The remix exhibit also displays works of poetry and prose by 30 internationally recognized writers, historians, and cultural purveyors, including Star writer Krip Yuson, US-based writer Jessica Hagedorn (she dedicated one of her books to Santi Bose when he passed away), Luis Francia, Howie Severino, John Silva, and Ed Geronia. Each writer drew literary inspiration, also from Santis’s anting-anting drawings, “bridging visual and literary art forms, while breaking cultural barriers.”

And through these visual and literary re-creations, I got to know Santi Bose a little bit more.  

Ed Geronia, who wrote a poem based on Santi’s 42nd anting-anting illustration, which contains a famous Latin palindromic square, the Sator Square, a popular symbol used by early Christians to identify themselves and to ward off evil, marvels at how Santi had mastered “the art of the cultural collage,” a method that he found can be applied to writing as well. “There was no single influence for Santi. You can take inspiration from anything: old elementary text books, postage stamps, a Tamagotchi, ancient amulets. Seeking inspiration from a diverse number of sources gives you incredible leeway creating your works.”

Australian-based artist, Alwin Reamillo, who met Santi in the ‘80s, photocopied the anting-anting images and used his own direct application techniques to superimpose them on toy piano lids, before adding layers of color and found objects, which Santi was also fond of doing. Alwin, who refers to Santi as the “closest practicing surrealist in the Philippines when he was still alive,” combined Santi’s art with influences from his own project, the Mang Emo + Mang Himo project, which involves the restructuring of a grand piano out of old scrounged-up parts and new mechanisms. (Alwin’s family was involved in the piano-making business until 1997; his father, the piano-maker, was fondly called Mang Himo.)

“Iba ang imagery ni Santi,” Alwin muses. His art picks at your brain, in pretty much the same way his relentless theories and discourses supposedly did. “Remix: Santiago Bose” also exhibits the artist’s many self-portraits, from an iconic self-portrait on a door, painted at the age of 27, to one of his last paintings where he “contemplates his mortality over a cemetery.” In these self-reflections, you glimpse images of a man who provoked a sense of culture, and relentlessly promoted Philippine identity — whatever that may be, in whatever form he could.

I never met Santiago “Santi” Bose, but it’s cool to know him.

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“Remix: Santiago Bose” will run until March 31 at the Yuchengco Museum, RCBC Plaza, corner Ayala and Sen. Gil J. Puyat Avenues, Makati City. Museum hours are Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 889-1234 or visit www.yuchengcomuseum.org.